The publication of The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (eds.), in 2004 enables and inspires this seminar: a (re)visitation of the critical primary and secondary texts which are (apparently) vital to the interpretation of nineteenth-century urban art-painting, printmaking and photography-especially (but not exclusively) in Paris. The goal of the class will be to analyze the relationship and links between practices of visual modernism and theories of urban modernity; technological modernity will be a leitmotiv. The touchstone primary texts will be the apposite writings of Charles Baudelaire, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. Secondary texts will include the work of Jonathan Crary, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, T.J. Clark, Pierre Nora, Sharon Marcus, Debora Silverman and others. Close reading and lively (well-informed) participation in weekly discussions will be the spines of the course. In her/his final paper (about 15 pages in length), each seminar member will test the analytical force of the writings of one or more scholars by using them to read a corpus of nineteenth-century urban art works, to which they have not been applied hitherto. Enrollment limit: 12.

Hour: HOLLY CLAYSON, CLARK VISITING PROFESSOR, FALL 2005